Or the taxpayers foot the bill for keeping the inmate in prison while private interests (including but not limited to private prisons and select contractors) take additional profit off the unpaid labor instead of passing savings to the consumer
Not every area is as messed up as the Colorado river watershed...
All users (states) were given an allotment which, when it was set, was more than what would ever be the yearly supply.
From the outset it was essentially a free for all. Everyone was happy, they kinda got what they asked. It's just that they were all living in a paper reality
When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.
My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.
Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?
The Salt River enabled the Phoenix area to be an agricultural power house long before Columbus arrived in America. The Pima practiced irrigation agriculture and were using their crop surpluses to trade far and wide.
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
> What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
This is entirely an artifact of arcane water law in the US. Any rational allocation would make alfalfa untenable there.
During WW2 the US leveled 1/3 of all buildings in Japan including most of the manufacturing industry. That didn't stop Japan from rebuilding and coming back stronger. The same is true of Germany, except East Germany turned out to be an abject failure.
Agreed, I stopped reading at that point. You can't take yourself seriously to create a report and use LOC as your measure.
I feel like we humans try to separate things and keep things short. We do this not because we think it's pretty, we do it so our human brains can still reason about a big system. As a result LOC is a bad measure as being concise then hurts your productivity????
We're careful not to draw any conclusions from LoC. The fact is LoCs are higher, which by itself is interesting. This could be a good or bad thing depending on code quality, which itself varied wildly person-to-person and agent-to-agent.
Which buyer are you referring to? Consumers paying cash can negotiate as much as they want, and often secure large discounts. Commercial health plans also negotiate hard with their network providers, although some of them play unethical tricks with PBMs to artificially inflate prescription drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid don't really negotiate with providers, they just set rates by arbitrary fiat and providers can take it or leave it. Medicare does have some statutory limitations on how they can negotiate drug prices, though.
Which doctors? Some specialists do quite well but many primary care physicians earn less than software developers, especially once you account for education expenses and ongoing mandatory professional expenses. What is the correct amount for them to earn anyway?
> Doesn't that violate all kinds of compliance controls?
Technically, only if it causes some kind of security, privacy, availability or accounting issue. The risk is high but it can be done.
Half of our customers do not have anything resembling a test environment. It is incredibly expensive to maintain a meaningful copy of production in this domain. Smaller local/regional banks don't bother at all.
Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
The public sector unions do represent a much larger share of the population than the CEOs but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending. Given they are being rewarded with huge amounts of tax dollars from the party they help keep/put in power, the concern that there's a systemic pay-to-play dynamic at work is very justified.
> but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending
Uh... Just no? Public spending? That's défense, health care, entitlements etcetera etcetera
I'll actually back it up with some numbers too:
> That’s 1% of gross domestic product, and almost 5% of total federal spending. The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP, Kettl said.
> Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
Not sure what you're basing that on but there's this too
> The statistic is used to show how unequal things have become in the U.S.: Some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay for an unexpected bill
Disposable income is essentially just income after tax. It’s the amount you have where you get to direct where it goes / how you dispose of it. It’s not money after essentials.
There are many ways to slice it but the US median income is high.
Your $400 stat is about liquidity and balance-sheet fragility; it doesn't tell you the cross-country level of median PPP-adjusted disposable income. OECD Figure 4.1 is the relevant comparison.
Generally, countries with more government social spending have lower savings rates, because people irresponsibly rely on the taxpayer as their backstop, so I'm not surprised at all. The U.S. actually has very high levels of social spending, despite the stereotype of it being a very free-market-oriented economy. That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Since you took the data for federal and state and local, you end up with 22.51 million employees[1].
Out of a total number of employed people of ~160M that's 1 in 8 employees. If you're calling 1 in 8 'a small share' the we just disagree there.
As to the $400 statistic, let me just point out that this
> That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Is very much an opinion, not a fact.
Maybe there's also that for the low income earners there isn't any money left after paying for housing, food and such. And I'm not even talking about health insurance.
Except for some rare cases, I think you'll find that the cost of keeping an inmate in prison for a day makes it that you never break even
reply